Sunday, January 4, 2015

Sometimes,
real life can be stranger than parody. This can be particularly true
when it comes to the beat we cover here at The Watch, civil liberties.
With that in mind, I’ve gone out on a limb to make some predictions
about what might happen on the civil liberties front in 2015. I realize
that some of these prognostications may seem a wee bit hyperbolic, a bit
paranoid, maybe even a little nutty. But I think we can all agree that
we should hope none of them actually do come to pass.
So on with the predictions. In 2015, I foresee the following:
•
A state judge will quite reasonably suggest that prosecutors shouldn’t
suborn perjury, shouldn’t retaliate against political opponents,
shouldn’t suppress evidence, and that we should discipline those who do.
That state’s prosecutors will revolt, accuse the judge of bias and demand that the judge recuse himself from all criminal cases.
• In the name of “preparation,” school officials will stage terrifying active-shooter scenarios
on children in which cops and other community leaders storm school
buildings with guns. In some cases, neither parents nor children will be
notified ahead of time that the scenario is a drill. In others, kids
will be recruited to play victims, complete with bloody bullet holes and
gaping wounds.
• We’ll see a record number of wrongly convicted men and women get exonerated, including some on death row. We’ll also see some horrifying executions gone wrong. Perversely, some death penalty states will respond by speeding up their executions — and making them less transparent.
• A large percentage of those wrongly convicted people will never be compensated for their arrests, convictions and time in prison.
•
Officers at a major metropolitan police department will get caught
breaking the law by fabricating tickets in order to steal overtime pay
from taxpayers. However, a court will rule that because the officers’
supervisors were also breaking the law, the officers can’t be held accountable.
•
The indiscriminate police raids will continue, with aggressive,
door-kicking raids on people suspected of increasingly petty crimes,
such as credit card fraud and underage drinking. In a rare moment of sanity, at least one federal appeals court will decide that maybe SWAT raids are an unconstitutionally excessive way to conduct regulatory inspections. But such raids will continue elsewhere.
• At least one former politician will come to appreciate how dangerous this trend really is, but only after he gets raided himself.• 2015 will also show that you can be subjected to a violent police raid for merely shopping at a gardening store.
• The government will dispense with “due process” and just start seizing property
from people without even charging them with a crime, much less
convicting them of one. The proceeds from these seizures will then go
back to the police departments and prosecutor officers that did the
seizing.
• Some cities will hand out free condoms . . . then arrest women who are in possession of them, on the theory that only women involved in sex work carry condoms.
• The Supreme Court will rule
that the government is allowed to charge you with a crime, then seize
all of your money before trial, on the argument that it is connected to
that crime — thus preventing you from paying for your defense.
• The federal government will offer snazzy
new surveillance equipment to local police departments. But those
departments will then use that equipment in investigations that have
nothing to do with national or homeland security. To protect the
technology, the federal government will then instruct those police
departments to lie to judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys about
when and how the technology is used, even if that means committing
perjury.
• In the never-ending drive to “get tough on sex
offenders,” cities will continue to demand that people convicted of some
sex-related crimes register with the government. But they’ll make it increasingly difficult for them to do so, and then punish them when they fail to comply.
•
Governments at all levels will continue to prosecute people for
destroying evidence in criminal cases, but brazenly conclude that
government officials at all levels can destroy evidence with virtual impunity.

•
Some city council will get upset enough about repeat incidents
of police lying and misconduct, and that despite the fact that while
citizen complaints have gone up, investigations of those complaints have
gone down. It will consider a law mandating termination for any cop
caught lying under oath. But it will then vote down the law after getting assured by the police chief that his officers are trustworthy.• The Justice Department will decide that the public doesn’t deserve to know when federal prosecutors commit misconduct, despite studies showing that misconduct at the federal level is rampant.
• Some dumb city officials will order a police raid, arrests and criminal charges because a parody Twitter account hurt the mayor’s feelings.
• Law enforcement officials in a major U.S. city will argue — apparently with a straight face — that cops must be allowed to have sex with prostitutes in order to properly investigate them.
• In some places, it will become a crime for a pregnant woman to have a miscarriage or stillbirth.
• In other places, it will become a crime to feed the homeless.
If
you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably already figured out the joke.
None of these are predictions for 2015. They’re all things that actually
happened in 2014.
Happy New Year!

Radley
Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties
for The Washington Post. He is the author of the book "Rise of the
Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces."